It’s a red-letter day here at CJR Daily. This is only our sixth reference to Tom Cruise in our short life, but the second one this week!
But we digress. First things first.
Seems that the “Everything You Know is Wrong” blog has finally become “Hitched out.” This is a common affliction among many on the left who are hurt, confused and angry over Christopher Hitchens’ seemingly unconditional support for the war in Iraq and the Bush administration, after having spent a career as a self-professed leftist and “contrarian.”
Hitch’s latest piece in Slate, in which he declares Joseph Wilson the bad guy and Karl Rove the good guy, was the impetus for the exasperation of EYKIW, who calls Hitch “a verbose, right-wing caricature who has apparently decided to carry the Bush administration’s water full-time since 9/11.”
This isn’t any criticism of EYKIW, but really, hasn’t Hitchens always been something of a verbose blowhard — albeit formerly with a socialist, slightly Trotskyite bent? He’s just switched sides.
CJR Daily has repeatedly written about the dearth of press coverage of the genocide in Sudan, and, sadly, the story has largely remained off of the front pages. Today we saw reports that while Secretary of State Condi Rice was visiting Sudan, members of the press corps were pushed around a little bit, for which Rice demanded — and got– an apology from the government of Sudan. Hieremias laments the fact that while Rice was upset over the rough treatment, she doesn’t seem as put out by the large-scale rape and murder going on in the country’s Darfur region:
while visiting the war-torn nation, rice did not ask for an apology for the campaign of genocide supported by the government that has killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, raped even more, and displaced 2 million … “they have no right to push and shove,” rice said. unbelievable arrogance, criminal ignorance.
It’s a Dog’s Life hopes that the treatment of the Rice delegation might cause the secretary of state to “come away with a clearer picture of what Sudan really is: a dictatorship where the rule of law exists only for the powerful, and where violence, intimidation and murder are the government’s weapons of choice against its own people.”
But back to decidedly lighter fare: Mr. Tom Cruise. By now we’re all familiar with the “Tom Cruise is gay” rumors that have been circulating for as long as Cruise has, much in the same way that we’re inundated with information about his seemingly carefully scripted whirlwind romance with Katie Holmes and their own creepy brand of press release love. So when we happened on this blog, the confluence of events that it chronicles gave us pause. Seems that W magazine recently headlined an interview with Katie, “The Actress Enters a Weird World Called TomKat” — the TomKat in question we take to be the Cruise/Holmes marriage-to-be. As the blog notes rather graphically, there is also a Los Angeles a movie theater called TomKat that serves a certain, ummm, niche market.
Coincidence? We’ll let our readers decide.
–Paul McLeary
Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.